Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys uses the word simulacrum, and it made me smile because I like the word and didn't even know I liked the word until I read it in the context of Grady Tripp's father disassembling himself. Sometimes it's not stories; sometimes it's just words. Or passages. I can never get enough of that passage, reading it under the sheets like porno. Though Wonder Boys is a great book as a whole.

Bright Lights, Big City is not to be underrated. I read it once and enjoyed it; I read it again and now think it's maybe one of my favorites.

Waves, Tissue, Bloodby Ben Spivey is not to be missed @ Abjective. Prose poetry like Jenga bricks. Fathers squirreling away their fortunes in Heaven, where we were always told we could not take our money, and were maybe told correctly. No one seems happy, in other words. Disintegrating and so on. Or maybe that is happiness--a state of love that's kind of meditative and vegetable in nature. Love across a distance that turns out to be infinite, as far as our lifespans are concerned.

Fight Club remains cool.

Soon comes Philip K. Dick's Ubik. A Philip with one L, he. Though I don't know many Philips to begin with, and the ones I do know I don't find myself spelling their names often.

David Foster Wallace's Signifying Nothing is both funny and horrifying in a deep and frightening way. The (still young) narrator doesn't really understand the depths of what he's angry about. He's not a writer, the narrator. It's what makes the story so powerful. It reads like a journal entry that exploded from an immature mind, capable of both pain and joy, but understanding neither.

That's all for now. President's Day was yesterday. I hope you celebrated as hard as I did.

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